Hani Hanjour: 9/11 Pilot Extraordinaire

[Flight Academy] Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon” the former employee said. “He could not fly at all.” [New York Times]

Federal Aviation Administration records show [Hanjour] obtained a commercial pilot’s license in April 1999, but how and where he did so remains a lingering question that FAA officials refuse to discuss. His limited flying abilities do afford an insight into one feature of the attacks: The conspiracy apparently did not include a surplus of skilled pilots. [Cape Cod Times]

Hani Hanjour as a Cessna 172 pilot

Cockpit of a Cessna 172

At Freeway Airport in Bowie, Md., 20 miles west of Washington, flight instructor Sheri Baxter instantly recognized the name of alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour when the FBI released a list of 19 suspects in the four hijackings. Hanjour, the only suspect on Flight 77 the FBI listed as a pilot, had come to the airport one month earlier seeking to rent a small plane.

However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot’s license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.

In the spring of 2000, Hanjour had asked to enroll in the CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., for advanced training, said the center’s attorney, Gerald Chilton Jr. Hanjour had attended the school for three months in late 1996 and again in December 1997 but never finished coursework for a license to fly a single-engine aircraft, Chilton said.

When Hanjour reapplied to the center last year, “We declined to provide training to him because we didn’t think he was a good enough student when he was there in 1996 and 1997” Chilton said. [Newsday]

On December 12, 2000, [Nawaf al Hazmi and Hani Hanjour] were settling in Mesa, Arizona, and Hanjour was ready to brush up on his flight training (Brush up? He could barely fly a Cessna). By early 2001, he was using a Boeing 737 simulator. Because his performance struck his flight instructors as sub-standard, they discouraged Hanjour from continuing, but he persisted.

At a speed of about 500 miles an hour, the plane was headed straight for what is known as P-56, protected air space 56, which covers the White House and the Capitol.

“The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane,” says O’Brien. “You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.” [NATCA]

But just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot[Hanjour] executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. The plane circled 270 degrees to the right to approach the Pentagon from the west, whereupon Flight 77 fell below radar level, vanishing from controllers’ screens, the sources said.

Less than an hour after two other jets demolished the World Trade Center in Manhattan, Flight 77 carved a hole in the nation’s defense headquarters, a hole five stories high and 200 feet wide.

Aviation sources said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm, possibly one of the hijackers. Someone even knew how to turn off the transponder, a move that is considerably less than obvious. [Washington Post]

“For a guy to just jump into the cockpit and fly like an ace is impossible – there is not one chance in a thousand,” said [ex-commercial pilot Russ] Wittenberg, recalling that when he made the jump from Boeing 727’s to the highly sophisticated computerized characteristics of the 737’s through 767’s it took him considerable time to feel comfortable flying. [LewisNews]

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado was informed by the FAA at 9:25 a.m. that American Airlines flight 77 might have been hijacked and appeared headed toward Washington. [CNN]

Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:38a.m., therefore it was ignored for 13 minutes as it headed toward the heart of the US government.

Another example of a hijacked jet being flown with extraordinary skill on 9/11…

William Middleton Sr., was running his street sweeper through the cemetery when he heard a harsh whistling sound overhead. Middleton looked up and spotted a commercial jet whose pilot seemed to be fighting with his own craft. [SouthCoast Today]

If the pilot was wrestling with the plane’s controls then it would not fly straight, but if the plane was ‘electronically hijacked‘ his actions would be irrelevant.